The end of 2021 saw big changes to the darkweb landscape – the V2 onion domain deprecation finally took place, rendering many older websites inaccessible.
The Tor Project finally pulled the plug on the “fundamentally insecure” domains, urging both owners and users to migrate (you can read the full statement here).
The current version of the Tor browser no longer supports the old, 16 character string domain names – in favour of the longer, 56 character ones. It is still possible to access some of the V2 domains using an old, pre-update version of the Tor browser – however there isn’t much point, since the general consensus was to move on.
This sadly means that many of the investigative resources I have published to date (examples here, here and here) no longer work.
The time has come to update the darkweb OSINT investigations toolkit and to include some contemporary 2022 material in it.
Clearnet resources
Ahmia – one of the oldest and most reliable .onion search engines, accessible both from the darknet and the clearnet.
Onion Search Engine – for searching onion sites. It comes with browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Various supported search options include images, videos, maps and pastes.
Tor Taxi – a launchpad website with links to multiple different onion domains. It has a handy colour-coded system for displaying websites that are currently down.
Darkweb Wiki – a somewhat chaotic and not frequently updated list of onion sites – still, a valuable resource.
Hunchly – provides daily darkweb reports of what onion domains are up / down, in the form of a spreadsheet.
IACA Darkweb Tools – free resources provided by the International Anti Crime Academy.
Reddit communities – many subreddits dedicated to various aspects of the darkweb can be found, some of which are hit and miss. However, there are 3 that are consistently good and up to date:
https://www.reddit.com/r/darknet/
https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/
Discord – an up-and-coming alternative to Reddit for budding online communities and niche topics, Discord already dominates in some aspects. While I have not yet found a publicly available channel worthy of a recommendation, you can darknet-keyword search the available Discord servers.
Darknet resources
Ahmia – as mentioned above, but specifically for Tor:
http://juhanurmihxlp77nkq76byazcldy2hlmovfu2epvl5ankdibsot4csyd.onion
Haystak – the self appointed “darknet’s largest search engine”, with thousands of indexed .onion domains – including some historical ones.
http://haystak5njsmn2hqkewecpaxetahtwhsbsa64jom2k22z5afxhnpxfid.onion/
Kilos – darknet market search engine allowing to search for vendors, listings, reviews, forums and forum posts. Useful for conducting broad keyword-based searches across multiple darkweb entities.
http://mlyusr6htlxsyc7t2f4z53wdxh3win7q3qpxcrbam6jf3dmua7tnzuyd.onion/search
TOR66 – on top of the standard search, this enables the “fresh onions” and “random onions” matches; tread with caution, these can bring you to some truly random sites.
http://tor66sewebgixwhcqfnp5inzp5x5uohhdy3kvtnyfxc2e5mxiuh34iid.onion/
Github tools
First and foremost, awesome list of tools by Apurv Singh Gautam is available here (but just a caveat, I have not used or tested all of those – yet).
Onioff – a Python tool for searching .onion URLs.
Onion Ingestor – for scraping and collecting darkweb intelligence – works with Kibana dashboards.
Onion Search – tool for scraping .onion URLs from darkweb search engines.
The Devils Eye – for extracting .onion site links and descriptions without connecting to Tor.
TorBot – onion crawler, with many additional features still in active development.
Bonus: Twitter accounts
Examples of some darkweb related quality reporting, news, updates, commentaries and other resources can be found by following these accounts on Twitter (a non-exhaustive list):
Add the Ahmia link graph: https://ahmia.fi/stats/link_graph/
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